How mixed martial arts changed my life
The Ultimate Fight
How mixed martial arts changed my life
I’d envisioned stepping into the cage so many times that when I finally entered the fenced-in, octagonal ring, it felt like déjà vu.
But nothing that followed went as expected.
For example, I’d thought I would feel the sensation one experiences when the roller coaster reaches the top of its first ascent and you gape at the sight of the tracks falling steeply away below — how you realize at that moment there’s no going back, and how that moment stretches on and on. But it wasn’t like that. As happens in other stressful situations — say, driving through a blizzard — time flowed with a maddening normalcy.
With a wave from the referee, my opponent and I approached each other and touched gloves. I remember only a vague anxiety that I would not perform at my best, and then we were punching each other in the face.
I fought my first mixed martial arts (MMA) bout last April at a Holiday Inn in Massachusetts, the closest state where it’s legal to host MMA fights. As of this writing, MMA events are illegal in Maine (and a shrinking number of other states) because, as with my personal experience, there’s still a big gap between people’s expectations or perceptions of MMA and what the sport is really about.
For me, fighting has been a spiritual journey that’s transformed me from a squirmy computer jockey into something resembling a real person.
As my University of Southern Maine undergraduate education drew to a close a few years ago, I was plagued by a vague but growing dissatisfaction with the way my life was unfolding.
Those around me slid smoothly from keg parties to button-down office work — some squeezing out offspring at the earliest opportunity — but I was skeptical. I thought there was supposed to be something more. I had assumed that life, or at least some substantial part of it, was going to feel like a righteous ’80s rock-guitar solo. Instead, it felt more like blown-out stereo speakers playing the saddest Coldplay tune ever, on repeat. I would wake up, put in a day at school and work, and go home feeling no closer to the person or the life I’d gone to USM hoping to find. I was a nebbish geek with bad posture, an expanding gut, and a future in some fluorescent-lit cubicle banging out computer code or sales copy or whatever.
(Read the rest of the story on the Bollard’s website here.)